Article Context:
Organizations spend approximately $2 trillion a year on digital transformation. Transformation efforts can yield up to 300% return on investment, yet it’s estimated that only 57% of organizations see strong returns. The converse is substantial losses, project cancellations, and write-offs.
It’s widely accepted that change management is an integral part of successful transformation. However, the understanding of what the practice of change management entails and how to execute it effectively is still underestimated, undervalued, and understaffed.
Adoption Is Not Launch
Adoption is not a launch, just as launching a business is not a success. Sure, it’s an accomplishment, and your aspirations for success are hopeful, but it just means you’re open for business.
Adoption requires the consistent application of desired behaviors and systems, much like anyone who has taken on a New Year’s resolution or tried to break a bad habit or build a good one. Adoption takes time and effort. We need to account for what happens when it’s not working, and how we scale up the measures we use to track it.
Why Adoption Takes Time
By focusing on adoption, organizations can truly realize the impact of long-term success. Go-live is merely the beginning of adoption. Even with the best training and strategic planning, mastery comes from application. Training is critical for knowledge and compliance, but it’s rarely sufficient for the long-term adoption of new behaviors.
Expect that people will take time to master new behaviors, skills, and technology, and allow for early mistakes and gradual improvement over time. Document best practices and monitor adoption progress after go-live, with mitigation plans to address gaps and deficiencies. Slow adoption and setbacks don’t mean failure; they’re an opportunity to learn, correct, and develop ways of working with that guide and inform future behavior.
Set Realistic Goals, Not Perfection
Perfection is an unrealistic goal and sets teams up for failure. Create tangible, realistic goals to aspire to. Don’t expect perfection, especially not at first: production may slip before it increases; processes may take more time before they become more efficient, and costs may go up before they come down. This is especially true in regulated environments such as biotech, health care, and finance, where people may spend two to three times as much time completing a process to make sure it’s done correctly and won’t come back to haunt them.
Set realistic goals to improve over time, leading to the realization of adoption goals and long-term value. Capture data trends, correct course where necessary, and publish outcomes so people can see their progress and glean confidence and validation from it. Adoption is a long-term goal, not a day-one checkpoint.
Overlooked Factors for Long-Term Success
Two commonly overlooked factors for long-term success are aligning the environment for change and rewarding the right behaviors.
Align Your Environment
One of the biggest barriers to adoption is trying to adopt something new when the current environment is in constant conflict with the desired future state. For example, one of the biggest barriers to people returning to the office four to five days a week after working remotely through COVID was that the environment around them had changed drastically to support remote work. People had invested in home offices that made it easier to work than the office, and childcare routines and schedules had changed; these were not easy to shift.
Or imagine trying to establish a culture of ethics where leadership is unethical. What if a great new ERP system just automates broken and obsolete procedures? If the environment isn’t properly aligned, even the most well-intentioned people will find it difficult to adopt change. People are hardwired to survive, and survival requires adaptation to the environment, so be sure the environment supports the future you want to achieve.
Reward the Right Behaviors
Sustained behavior in organizations requires that the desired actions be demonstrated by people of influence and rewarded consistently. Organizational missions and visions are important for motivating change, but adoption relies on how people are rewarded for it: does it improve their life, and is it consistent with their personal goals or identity? New behaviors must be believed to be more advantageous or rewarding, and just as important, old behaviors need to become less comfortable or less desirable than new ones.
For example, if you want to implement a system to improve quality of customer service, but associates are only rewarded for the number of customers processed, you may be rewarding behavior that conflicts with your goal. Many readers can relate to being stuck in endless transfers or treated like a number in a queue. Most people want their jobs to be rewarding and to be able to go home on time; if you can help them accomplish that, change is more likely to stick.
Conclusion
Proactive commitment to planning adoption will help you achieve your aspirational return on investment, and it will establish trust as people see their efforts to change result in tangible individual and organizational outcomes. Aligning your environment and rewarding the right behaviors will help keep your transformation journey on the road to success.
Successful organizational change is not achieved simply by implementing a new system, process, or technology. It depends on whether people adopt and sustain the change over time. Organizations that prioritize effective communication, stakeholder engagement, practical training, and continuous reinforcement are far more likely to realize long-term business value and maximize their transformation investments.
At Compliance Group, we help life sciences organizations navigate organizational change with a structured, people-centered approach that supports adoption, minimizes disruption, and strengthens long-term sustainability. From change strategy and stakeholder engagement to training and adoption support, CG helps organizations build the foundation for last change.